T -7 Days And Counting

Today marks one week out from surgery (I can't believe how quickly the last month has flown!) and the jitters have definitely taken hold. My head has been all over the place this past week, with my emotions bouncing liberally between excited and anxious, happiness and fear. I guess that's to be expected with any major surgery, but I can say from experience it's not the most fun roller coaster ride. And I was never a fan of roller coasters to start.

The pre-op diet has not been easy to stick with. Especially when feeling emotional/stressed out and craving comfort food. I caved one day last week and had a small serving of mac n' cheese and it took me 3 days to get totally back on plan again. Clearly, all those things about carbs being "addictive" have some truth to them, even if the addictive part is all psychological. Since then, I've been on the look out for non-carb/fat laden comfort foods and have hit upon an old favorite: Tom Kar soup. It's essentially a Thai chicken soup with delicious flavors of Kaffir lime leaf, galangal, scallion, and coconut milk. Look for the recipe in tomorrow's post.

My short-term tumble off the wagon aside, the diet has been amazingly successful so far. (Not completely suprising since I'm eating less than half the calories each day that my body would require to maintain my current weight.) I've lost about 8lbs according to my bathroom scale, bringing me to 320.2 lbs. Pretty impressive for me in such a short amount of time (12 days.) Particularly given the fact that when I'm eating a diet that's a bit less drastically reduced in the calorie department I tend to lose weight at a rate of roughly 1/3rd to 1/2 pound per week...maybe.

Speaking of the pre-op diet, I burned through the vanilla torte flavored protein mix and a now trying the cappucino flavor. It's still a bit sweeter than I prefer, but it has a good strong coffee flavor with a bit of "creaminess" to imply the steamed milk on a real cappucino. I mixed it with my morning coffee yesterday morning because I had run out of milk and it was quite good. (I should also mention for those of you playing along at home that the "grab-n-go" individual serving packets in the link are more expensive than if you were to buy a 1 pound tub of the stuff. I haven't been buying the tubs of anything except the unflavored protein mix because I'm more likely to stick with the diet and drink the damn shakes if I can mix one up when I'm not at home.)

That's the exciting update....I'm off to enjoy the unseasonably warm December weather (55F!)